---
title: "AUTO–"
description: "Stephanie Sherman uses the history of Ford and the automobile to argue that automation is not the replacement of human labor by machines but a planetary, evolutionary process: decisions that once had…"
type: "reading-notes"
authors:
  - "Stephanie Sherman"
published: "2025-05-10"
original_url: "https://auto.antikythera.org/"
doi: "10.1162/ANTI.5CZA"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/auto"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/journal/auto"
last_updated: "2026-08-23"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# AUTO–

> Independent, unofficial reading notes from Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki). Written with AI from the published text, with citations; not by the work's author and not affiliated with Antikythera (https://antikythera.org). Read the original at the link below.

- **Authors:** Stephanie Sherman
- **Published:** 2025-05-10
- **Kind:** Journal · Journal article
- **DOI:** https://doi.org/10.1162/ANTI.5CZA
- **Original:** https://auto.antikythera.org/
- **Length:** 24k words
- **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/auto
- **Notes generated:** 2026-08-23

## Summary

[Stephanie Sherman](https://antikythera.wiki/people/stephanie-sherman) uses the history of Ford and the automobile to argue that automation is not the replacement of human labor by machines but a planetary, evolutionary process: decisions that once had to be made are embedded into devices and environments, where they persist and constrain what comes next. Platforms are the means of that embedding, and the automobile is her primary case of "platform automation" going wrong and, possibly, right. The prefix *auto* promises self-containment, but every auto-process (automaton, automobile, autopoietic system, autonomous vehicle) depends on external power and external constraint. Sherman works through seven senses of the prefix and concludes that the drives that produced the asphalt planet may be redirected if the problem is treated as one of environments rather than devices, momentum rather than motive, and coordination rather than control.

## The argument

Sherman opens with a claim about a word. *Auto* nearly always means "self" and nearly always implies something self-generating, yet that implication disguises the dependencies that any auto-process actually has. The automobile is the clearest case, and Ford is the clearest institution, because Ford built a "platform of platforms": electrified mass assembly, the coining of "automation" in 1946, and later the mission control systems of Apollo. Her thesis is that these Fordist histories are a prehistory of computational force, and that the automotive complex shows both the pathologies and the possibilities of what she calls [platform automation](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/platform-automation).

The definitional moves come early. Automation, following Buckminster Fuller, is an evolutionary process in which something once open to decision resolves into a predetermined context, which then enables further formations. Platforms are foundations that make other things possible, and they share dynamics across domains: they simplify to proliferate, centralize to decentralize, fix standards to enable variation. Platform automation is therefore "the process of programming" in a broad sense, applying to cells and planets as much as to factories. The consequence is geographic. Ronald Horvath's "machine space" names the territory given over to cars, and Sherman sharpens it into a line she sets in bold: the Anthropocene was an era in which humans thought they were designing a planet for humans but designed one for machines. She names the parallel epoch the [Autocene](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/autocene), an incomplete age whose first phase is a wicked problem and whose later phase might be a reorientation.

The body of the essay then runs through the prefix. The car inherits the automaton's two deceptions: its power comes from elsewhere and its direction is prescribed. Drive is better explained by momentum than by motive, and the unconscious belongs to infrastructure rather than the psyche. Self-reproducing systems cannot see cascades, which is why highway systems were built road by road. The autonomous vehicle is an environment problem, not an agent problem. Autonomy is freedom from rather than freedom to. And Ballard's *Crash* diagnoses an automotive death drive whose pathology and remedy share an impulse.

Where the essay lands is a design position. The operator is dead, on the factory floor in 1946 and in the driver's seat now. The car becomes a node in an urban sensing platform, less autonomous than before because it is tied to every other agent, and cities should be reprogrammed around coordinated autonomous mobility rather than waiting for vehicles to cope with infrastructure built for private ownership. Sherman's final formulation is that automotive agents need be "only as intelligent as the city surrounding them demands."

## Section by section

### Auto

The opening section sets the paradox and the cast. Sherman lists the senses of *auto*, argues that the heuristic of self-containment conceals contingencies between self and system, and introduces Ford as the firm that "programmed a platform of platforms." The working definitions of platform and platform automation are given here, with a note that as synthetic intelligence shifts from programming to learning, platform automation comes to mean cultivation rather than prescription, and its focus moves from agents to environments.

The stakes are established through machine space, which Sherman extends to machine time: the labor, policy, and design that service cars. The automobile bent ideology around freedom and escape, entrenched fossil fuels, and accelerated geological time into the Anthropocene. The coinage of the Autocene follows, with the essay's most direct question: whether the maladies of this age contain the components of a more rational mobility system, or whether the drives that produced the disaster would always undermine such an effort.

### Automation: From Simulation to Stimulation

Sherman dates the word to 1946, when Ford's vice president of manufacturing Delmar Harder coined it, the year women programmed ENIAC and Bell Labs started a mobile phone service in St. Louis. At Ford it meant "transfer automation," linking independent machine processes so that production flowed without operators, and Ford insisted in 1954 that this was "just another evolutionary phase" of mechanization. John Diebold used the same word in the same year but argued the opposite: automation was a new paradigm, "the ideal of self-regulating systems," a philosophy of production rather than a set of machines. James Bright mediates: automation is always relative to the mechanization it grows from.

"The death of the operator" names what Fordist automation actually did. Humans were relieved of manual operation but still designed, maintained, and supervised, and Sherman's point is that the same transition is now happening in the car. Under "Platform Programming" she notes that the chassis, the Model T's standardized base, was the first part to be automated (by A. O. Smith & Co. by 1908), and that GM's later "platform strategy" paired a standardized chassis with variable styling. Babbage's study of the factory before designing the analytical engine shows that taking systems apart part by part is the shared logic of factory and computer. Her reading of the assembly line, via Marx and McLuhan, is that it was a theater for rehearsing automation: workers "were playing at being machines."

"Automation as a Planetary Process" delivers the central definition through Fuller. Automation is the evolutionary resolution of decisions into persistent contexts, such that what once required cognitive oversight becomes part of the environment. This makes automation path-dependent and driverless in principle, and makes evolution itself a process of automation. "Persistent Prospects" adds that under AI this delegation looks more like learning than programming.

### Automobiles: From Machines to Robots

This section gives the automobile its genealogy in the automaton. Cugnot's steam cart of 1769 carried its power-processing mechanism on board but drew its energy from elsewhere, unlike a bicycle's closed loop. Sherman follows Karl Gottlieb von Windisch's pamphlet on the Mechanical Turk, which distinguished two deceptions, *via motrix* (motive power) and *via directrix* (directive power): automata concealed both their energy source and the prescription of their movements. She reads this as a description of the human condition too. Drawing on Jessica Riskin and Étienne-Jules Marey, she argues that volition is externally constructed, that the force of life is momentum rather than motive, and that an agent following its momentum can unwittingly work against its own species.

"Motion Pictures" turns to demand. The Model T came in black because black paint dried fastest, in many body styles on one chassis, and Ford engineered the desire for it through profit-sharing, newspapers, dealerships, and the Ford Motion Picture Unit, the largest industrial film company of its time. "Automata and Driver-Cars" takes John Urry's "driver-car" as the merger of body and machine and reads the encasing of the driver in glass and steel as a delusion of individual control. The section ends with the emerging paradigm: the car as a node in a swarm, "a computer to ride in." The driver, Sherman writes, "is dead."

### Automatic: From Motive to Momentum

The section opens with the incremental history of automatic functions, from power locks in 1914 to automatic shift in 1949 and cruise control. Each was received as an easement rather than a threat, and contested features (seat belts, airbags, speed limiters) were normalized after adoption. Sherman concludes that most technological change is iterative, that de-skilling laments are overweighted, and that when the specific becomes automatic, more general knowledge becomes possible, at the cost of control in emergencies.

"Physics Precedes the Psyche" turns to the Surrealists and Futurists. Automatic writing was thinking without cognizance, with an unresolved tension: Freud held that nothing psychic is arbitrary, while the automatic was also a celebration of chance. Marinetti's manifesto followed his crash in a Fiat in 1908. Sherman distills two directions of disquiet, fear that a machine will attain conscious awareness and fear that a human will be reduced to imitating a machine, then makes her own move: a materialist unconscious, "embedded material" distributed through infrastructures, producing a rift between infrastructural time and cognitive time. Psychosis becomes an expression of unreconciled social incongruity rather than an internal condition.

"The Platform Unconscious" anchors this in Bateson's example of knowing the way to Cambridge: the better an organism knows something, the less conscious it is of knowing it. The autonomic nervous system is the model; its involuntary functions prevent self-destruction (you cannot hold your breath until you die) in a way driving does not (you can drive off a cliff). Sherman treats the autonomic as the highest form of intelligence because it frees the brain, and notes that automatic systems present themselves only on breakdown, as the dashboard light does. "Pleasures" closes with amusement rides as transportation without destination and the prediction that human driving will be confined to proving grounds and games, while gaming environments train the vehicles.

### Autopoiesis: From Adaptative Reproduction to Artificial Evolution

Sherman reads Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis as having set off an obsession with self-generation that spread to Stafford Beer's viable systems and Hayek's self-organizing markets, and she argues this obsession explains why design has fixated on devices rather than environments. Against it she sets Papanek's distinction between autoplastic adaptation and alloplastic transformation of the environment, and proposes that tools and infrastructure are "allopoietic externalization," augmentation rather than internal reproduction.

"Path-Dependence and Infrastructural Acquiescence" applies this to roads. Following Urry, the automotive system grew autopoietically, street by street, and a reproducing thing that uses itself as its model cannot account for cascades. Reyner Banham's description of Los Angeles freeway driving as "willing acquiescence" is quoted at length, including his suggestion that the gains of automation might be offset by the psychological loss of the illusion of free decision. Sherman takes this as what most critics of automation omit: the cost is not jobs but a sustaining delusion of control. "Closed Systems and Permeable Boundaries" adds Luhmann's operationally closed systems, in which forgetting is functional, and Stiegler's observation that nothing has in itself the source of its own production. Her conclusion distinguishes swarm intelligence, where agents coordinate against environmental pressure, from autopoietic development, where each agent modulates only against direct encounters. Platform automation should shift from the self-reproducing agent to the self-sustaining environment.

### Autonomousness: From Control to Contingency

The section's primal scene is Leonardo's spring-driven cart, which navigated Florence by sensing stakes placed in the streets. What was programmed was the cart's responsive behavior, not the route, and Florence's one-way streets made it work. Sherman draws from this a five-hundred-year confusion between control designed into the device and control designed into the environment. "The Autonomous Platform Stack" lists the convergences required, from lidar and 5G to insurance and regulation, and argues that the fate of autonomous vehicles depends on that stack rather than on agent-level decisions.

"Always-Incomplete Autonomousness" reviews the SAE's six levels as a heuristic that distracted research toward designations and away from the interdependence of drivers, riders, and environments. Tesla is read as following the Ford playbook, testing in the wild and pivoting in early 2025 from a cheaper consumer car to a robotaxi platform; its tunnel is her example that "artificial stupidity" can be programmed as readily as intelligence. With Sam Hind's six-layer automobility stack, the car becomes a node in a city platform. Streets must therefore be reprogrammed too, and platformization makes each car less autonomous, since it is algorithmically tied to every other agent.

"From Devices to Environments" uses the 2018 death of Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona. The safety supervisor was watching a livestream, but the family sued the city, because the road's affordances suggested a crossing without providing one. Sherman also reports the developers' consensus that Levels 3 and 4 are harder to make safe than Level 5 because partial human supervision fails in the split second. The AV problem, she concludes, is an environment-development problem.

### Autonomy: From Independence to Interdependence

Sherman takes André Gorz's critique that the car is a luxury devalued by its own spread and that traffic is a geometry problem rather than an efficiency problem; as long as the chassis stays the same size, autonomous vehicles do not solve mobility. The traffic light, first installed in 1868, is her governance device: it shows that autonomy exists only within constructed limits. Rideshare is the most powerful interruption of the automotive economy, since it decoupled mobility from ownership and driving.

She then reworks the concept. Kant's autonomy was independence of moral reason; the modern sense became individual choice and then market choice. Against both, she proposes, with Paul Preciado, autonomy as negative freedom: freedom from conscious decision and operational occupation, produced by automation. "The Problem and Potential of Work" reads Marx's fragment on machines, in which workers become "conscious linkages" of an automatic system, as implying that the worker finds autonomy by becoming autonomous from work. Sherman does not propose a workless utopia. Citing Wiener, she proposes decoupling work from necessity, so that work looks more like care or philosophy. The section ends by inverting Fordist ownership into a platform of use: shared transport coordinated across the stack, autonomy as independence by way of interdependence.

### Autodestruction: From Death Drive to Pervasive Pleasure

The final section asks whether the pathology of hurtling across highways in metal boxes could be leveraged toward collective thriving. Ballard's 1970 *Crashed Cars* exhibition provoked vandalism and an assault on its opening night and led to *Crash*, which Sherman reads as a diagnosis of how the incapacity to process systems failure warps into sexual perversion. Perversions, she argues, also occur in systems at planetary scale, where misalignment between resources, incentives, and labor produces destruction. The public tolerates deaths from human error far more readily than from machines, a preference for control in spite of autodestruction.

"Perpetual Physics" surveys car films and proposes that it is "time to queer the chassis": to break the fixed platform built for a family of five toward vehicles rightsized for diverse missions. The operator dies; a rider is born. "Coordination over Control" notes that autonomous vehicles reduce small local accidents but increase the potential for large-scale failures (jams, hacks, fleets refusing rules). James Bridle trapping a car in a drawn circle and Lacan's bumper-car thought experiment show that systematization does not override drive, and that any vehicle is more contingent on the general system than on its own features. "Intentional Accidents for Autobodies" closes with Churchland on brittle pattern recognition and Laplanche on revolutions that carry their forerunners. Sherman's final claim is that the autodestruction built into the early Autocene may be both pathology and remedy, since the compulsion to repeat also propels "the pleasure of perpetual reiteration," toward auto-regeneration, urban-scale computation, and a post-ownership geometry.

## Key concepts

- **[Platform automation](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/platform-automation)** — The process by which platforms standardize, which enables interoperability and programmability, which enables automation, which builds further platforms. Sherman applies it across biology, geology, and technology, and treats it as shifting from prescription to cultivation under learning systems.
- **Automation (Fuller's sense)** — An evolutionary process in which a decision once open to deliberation congeals into a device or environment and no longer needs conscious review. Evolution itself is a form of it; it is driverless by definition.
- **[Autocene](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/autocene)** — The incomplete epoch instantiated by the automotive complex and the planetary interconnectivity of hardware and software it mobilized. Its first phase is a wicked problem; its later phase may be a reorientation.
- **Machine space** — Horvath's term for territory given over to the movement, storage, and servicing of cars; Sherman's evidence that the Anthropocene designed a planet for machines.
- **Death of the operator** — The relief of humans from manual operation while design, maintenance, and supervision remain. First realized on Ford's factory floor in 1946, now being realized in the driver's seat.
- **[Momentum over motive](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/momentum-over-motive)** — The principle that systems and organisms are driven by accumulated mass and inertia rather than by purpose or hidden intention.
- **[Platform unconscious](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/platform-unconscious)** — The unconscious relocated from psyche to infrastructure: shared constraints and affordances distributed through environments, holding the fragments of society not yet rationalized.
- **Autopoiesis and [allopoiesis](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/allopoiesis)** — Self-reproduction from within (Maturana and Varela), which Sherman blames for the device-fixation of design, against the allopoietic externalization of tools and infrastructure that transform environments.
- **Autonomousness** — A device's operation without external control, always incomplete because it depends on environmental constraints, as Leonardo's cart depended on one-way streets.
- **Autonomy as negative freedom** — Freedom from conscious decision and operational occupation, produced by automation, as distinct from freedom to act. Independence by way of interdependence.

## Connections

- [Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/spoc) gives Bratton's version of the autopoiesis/allopoiesis distinction, where allopoiesis is the general definition of artificialization. Sherman agrees on the direction but arrives from design history and Papanek rather than evolutionary biology.
- [Planetary Sapience Symposium](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/planetarysapience) contains Sherman's own précis of this project, with the same Fuller-derived definition of automation as delegation.
- [Cognitive Infrastructures](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra), which Sherman cites in her first note, is the program frame for the platform unconscious. Its paper [Cognition With and Beyond the Brain](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/cognition-with-and-beyond-the-brain) argues that cognition is distributed through assemblages rather than located in the brain; the two agree, with Sherman supplying the infrastructural and psychoanalytic register.
- [The Stack](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/the-stack) supplies the platform theory Sherman generalizes and, in the User layer, the "machine User" and death of the User that her death of the operator extends. The relation is agreement; her contribution is the historical case.
- [What Is Intelligence?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/what-is-intelligence) offers dynamic stability, persistence through change without purpose, which does the same work as Sherman's momentum over motive in a different vocabulary.
- [The Long L](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/longl) uses generative entrenchment to explain why younger planetary layers can modify but never replace older ones. Sherman's path-dependent platforms upon platforms is the same sedimentation image applied to roads and chassis.
- [Some Movements of Models](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/movementsofmodels) traces the Apollo-era simulation lineage that Sherman names but does not develop when she lists mission control among Ford's platforms.
- [Existential Technologies](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/existentialtech) and [The Noocene](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noocene) share Sherman's framing of the Autocene as a self-produced predicament: Konior on technologies that alter evolutionary trajectories over long spans, Bratton on intelligence undermining its own foundations. Sherman is more willing than either to locate the remedy inside the pathology itself.


## Terms used

- [Autocene](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/autocene)
- [Momentum over Motive](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/momentum-over-motive)
- [Platform Automation](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/platform-automation)
- [Platform Unconscious](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/platform-unconscious)

## Related works

- [Some Movements of Models](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/movementsofmodels)
- [Existential Technologies](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/existentialtech)
- [The Long L](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/longl)
- [The Noocene](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noocene)
- [Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/babynoosphere)